Chaucer and Language

Susan McKnight is an administrator of the Courts Technology Integrated Justice Project at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Robert Myles is director of humanistic studies at McGill University; his
coeditor, David Williams, teaches English at the same institution. In
this book, they have assembled scholarly essays that are based on the
thesis that the main subject of Chaucer’s works is language
(“Chaucer knew that speech acts, and he reveled in exploring,
experimenting with, and demonstrating such action”).

The first essay, by Myles, is a tribute to the work done by Douglas
Wurtele in the field of Chaucer criticism and language study (a list of
Wurtele’s works is included at the back of the book). The next two
essays deal with the Wife of Bath and draw opposite conclusions (one
states that the language suggests “conscious ambiguation” of her
character, while the other leans toward “disambiguation”). A number
of the essays discuss Chaucer’s use of signs, both given and natural.
Several refer to his employment of Augustinian ethics through semantics.
His careful use of metaphor and irony is covered extensively.

This well-documented collection of essays will be of interest to anyone
studying language as a theory of signs.